Salinas Pliego paid Black Cube, a firm of Israeli ex-agents, £1.1M to pose as oil executives and trap his rival's lawyer into leaking case secrets over drinks.

This article originally appeared in the July 22, 2026 edition of SinEmbargo, an independent Mexican digital news outlet.

Mexico City, July 22 (SinEmbargo).– Ricardo Salinas Pliego hired Black Cube, a private intelligence firm founded by former Israeli agents, to obtain information about Vladimir Sklarov, with whom he has a legal dispute over an alleged $415 million fraud, The Telegraph reported.

According to the British newspaper, which cites a ruling by the Court of Appeal, Black Cube’s investigators carried out a covert operation against Sklarov’s lawyers, from the London firm DWF. To get close to them, they posed as executives of an Italian oil company seeking legal representation in a supposed dispute related to the United Arab Emirates.

Mexican journalist Laura Sánchez Ley, who also had access to the documentation, revealed that first there was a Zoom call with the Black Cube agent. Then they invited him to Amsterdam, all expenses paid, to “close the terms of the assignment.” There they met with him twice in a single day, a business lunch and then a dinner with alcohol, at which the lawyer did not usually drink. Everything was recorded.

El día de ayer se publicó esta sentencia en Inglaterra que revela algo escandaloso: Salinas Pliego contrató a Black Cube, una firma de inteligencia privada fundada por exoficiales de inteligencia israelí, para montar una operación encubierta contra un abogado que llevaba el caso… pic.twitter.com/QrI0iXVH95

— Laura Sánchez Ley (@LauraSanchezLey) July 22, 2026

These meetings with the fake businessmen included a five-and-a-half-hour dinner during which they offered him alcohol and induced him to reveal confidential information about the litigation, as The Telegraph recounted based on the court information it accessed.

During those conversations, Sánchez Ley explained, the agent gradually led the lawyer to talk about the strategy and weaknesses of the case he was representing, including the effect the preventive asset freezes against his client were having.

Black Cube reportedly received an advance of 1.1 million pounds sterling, in addition to possible bonuses, to establish a relationship of trust with the lawyer. The information obtained during the operation was later used by Salinas Pliego’s legal team in the proceedings against Sklarov.

Judge Lord Males, of the Court of Appeal, found that these tactics constituted a “serious abuse” of the judicial process and stated that they had no place in litigation before the courts of England and Wales. Although he did not determine whether Black Cube’s actions amounted to a crime, he decided to lift the asset-freezing order against Sklarov.

Laura Sánchez Ley, for her part, explained that the Court describes the technique as a sustained harassment of questions, designed to push him toward confidential ground, taking advantage of the fact that the lawyer, recently promoted to partner, wanted to impress a potential client.

“What weighs most in the ruling is that the judges, led by Lord Justice Males, concluded that this was not just an ethical lapse but an abuse of the judicial process in itself, regardless of whether the information obtained turned out to be useful or not,” the journalist noted. “The court was explicit that deceiving the opposing lawyer to extract privileged information is a form of corruption, and that this type of conduct has no place in the courts of England and Wales.”

The litigation originated over the handover of Grupo Elektra shares, valued at $415 million, as collateral for a $115 million loan. Salinas Pliego accuses Sklarov of having deceived him through false identities and supposed ties to the Astor family; Sklarov maintains, for his part, that the Mexican businessman defaulted on the loan and that he used aliases to avoid discrimination because of his Jewish and Ukrainian origin.

According to The Telegraph, Sklarov was arrested in Chicago in May 2026 and charged with fraud by U.S. authorities. Representatives of Salinas Pliego and Black Cube argued that the evidence was obtained legally, while DWF declined to comment because the litigation is ongoing. The Court of Appeal ruled that the case must go to trial.

At the end of June, the newspaper The Times revealed how the London Court of Appeal began its review of the case of Vladimir Sklarov, who allegedly used false identities and claimed to have the financial backing of the Astor family, and who agreed in 2021 to lend $115 million to Salinas, who handed over as collateral securities valued at $450 million.

Shortly afterward, the shares began to be sold and part of the money was reportedly transferred to accounts in Monaco linked to the defendant’s relatives.

Salinas sued Sklarov in 2024 before the British High Court and obtained a worldwide order to freeze $400 million in assets, including properties in France, Chicago, and Athens, as well as a yacht.

Although the judge initially considered that there was solid evidence of fraud and that the lawsuit had a good chance of success, he refused to issue a summary judgment because of the tactics used by the private investigators hired by Salinas, who secretly recorded Sklarov’s lawyer and obtained new evidence through a covert operation.

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